Staff Software Engineer, Labs: Applied AI

Anthropic$320K — $405K *
Consumer Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience in building full-stack applications, ideally in startup environments
  • Strong curiosity about diverse industries and ability to simplify complex workflows
  • Energized by ambiguity and uncertainty, thriving in transformative projects
  • Hacker mentality with a focus on rapid shipping and pragmatic trade-offs
  • User-centric mindset to validate ideas and gather feedback before deep investment
  • Skilled in articulating insights from experiments and adapting based on evidence
  • Versatile generalist capable of shifting focus based on evolving organizational priorities

Responsibilities

  • Rapidly prototype applications that integrate frontier AI into non-software-native workflows
  • Engage directly with users to learn about their workflows and encapsulate that knowledge into products
  • Collaborate with research teams to translate AI model capabilities into user-friendly tools
  • Gather feedback from internal and external partners to refine product concepts
  • Run structured experiments to test hypotheses while balancing exploration and evaluation
  • Create documentation and insights to transition prototypes into full product teams
  • Advise research teams on model effectiveness in practical settings and areas for improvement

Benefits

  • Visa sponsorship available with reasonable efforts to assist candidates
  • Encouragement for diverse applicants, including those who may not meet every qualification
  • Commitment to societal impact and ethics of work in AI development
Full Job Description
About the role

At Anthropic, we're building AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and transformative. Our mission is to develop AI that benefits humanity, and we believe the most powerful capabilities emerge when we thoughtfully bridge the gap between research breakthroughs and real-world applications.

Applied AI is one of the newest explorations within Anthropic Labs, the internal accelerator behind Claude Code, MCP, and Claude Design. Most of the world's work happens far from a code editor, and the people doing it have barely begun to feel what frontier AI can do. We believe Claude has a transformative role to play here - and we're at the earliest stage of exploring what that could look like. The engineers who join now will define where it goes.

We're looking for versatile, entrepreneurial engineers who are energized by building for users unlike themselves. In this role, you'll take frontier AI capabilities and turn them into applications that professionals in less software-native roles can pick up and trust - rapidly building and testing new experiences, partnering directly with researchers, domain experts, and users, and generating the insights that shape where this exploration goes next. You'll need to be comfortable with ambiguity, willing to kill your own projects when the data says to, and energized by the pace of building in uncharted territory.
Responsibilities
  • Rapidly prototype full-stack applications that bring frontier AI into workflows that have never been software-first, shipping early and often to maximize learning
  • Immerse yourself in unfamiliar domains: sit with users, learn how their work actually gets done, and encode that understanding into products, evaluations, and workflows
  • Collaborate closely with research teams to understand new model capabilities and translate them into tools that non-technical professionals reach for first
  • Work directly with internal teams and external partners across industries to gather feedback, iterate quickly, and validate (or invalidate) product concepts
  • Design and run structured experiments to test hypotheses, balancing creative exploration with rigorous evaluation
  • Generate documentation and insights to guide successful prototypes toward full product teams
  • Provide feedback to research teams about model effectiveness in real-world, domain-heavy settings and where capabilities can improve
  • Flexibly contribute across Labs initiatives based on organizational priorities and emerging opportunities - context from one project should inform the next
You may be a good fit if you
  • Have 8+ years of experience building full-stack applications, with a track record of zero-to-one work in startup or startup-like environments
  • Are deeply curious about how other industries work, and enjoy translating messy, real-world workflows into simple software
  • Thrive in ambiguity and are energized (not anxious) by uncertainty - you're comfortable working on projects that might not exist in three months
  • Have a hacker mentality: high agency, bias toward shipping, comfort with technical debt when it's the right tradeoff
  • Are deeply user-centric - you validate ideas with actual users before over-investing and talk about problems before solutions
  • Can articulate learnings from failed or killed projects without defensiveness; you treat your work as experiments
  • Hold strong opinions loosely - you advocate forcefully for ideas but change your mind based on evidence
  • Are a generalist who can transition between different problem spaces as priorities shift
  • Work independently with good judgment about what matters, without needing constant direction
  • Communicate effectively and can make complex AI capabilities feel intuitive to people who don't think in software
  • Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work
Strong candidates may also have
  • Experience building products for industries outside of tech - e.g., healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, construction, energy, agriculture, financial services, education, or the public sector
  • A previous career, or deep hands-on exposure, in a field outside of software - you've been the user these products serve
  • Background conducting embedded or field-based discovery: user research, interviews, ride-alongs, and usability testing with frontline professionals
  • Experience integrating with the systems these industries actually run on (ERPs, EHRs, CRMs, dispatch, scheduling, or point-of-sale systems)
  • Experience shipping software or AI applications to non-technical or frontline users - you know how to design for people who will never read documentation, and you measure success by real-world adoption rather than technical elegance
  • Hands-on applied AI experience - you've built and deployed products powered by AI/ML or large language models
  • Experience collaborating directly with research teams in AI/ML environments
Candidates need not have
  • 100% of the skills listed above
  • Formal certifications or education credentials
  • Direct machine learning or AI research experience


The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role's On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$320,000-$405,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

About Anthropic

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence research lab that focuses on developing AI systems that are safe, reliable, and trustworthy. The company was founded in 2019 by Dr. Yoshua Bengio, a leading AI researcher and winner of the Turing Award. Anthropic's research is focused on developing AI systems that can learn from small amounts of data, reason about complex systems, and interact with humans in a natural way. The company is based in New York City and has a team of experienced AI researchers and engineers.
Learn more about Anthropic
Size
50 employees
Industry
Founded
2019

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